What to expect from an Amazon smartphone

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

We’ve heard about at least one smartphone being made by Amazon for years now, but there has never been an announcement to follow those (numerous) leaks and rumors. Amazon has everything needed to make an Android phone, and enough experience with their own hardware and software to make it something people will actually buy. Instead of releasing yet another black rectangle, it looks like Amazon has something special in mind for its first smartphone.

Anyone who has picked up the most recent Kindle Fire tablet knows that Amazon has got the hardware thing down. The company has made several tablets now that may not win points for having the sexiest design, but that more than make up for that by feeling sturdy, light, and capable of delivering a great experience. Amazon’s team has a firm grasp on the audio, the video, and the wireless radios necessary to make a great device. With the most recent Kindle Fire, the front-facing camera was a new add on that worked exactly as well as you’d expect. Amazon is expected to offer a 13MP rear facing camera and a front facing camera similar to the one found on their Fire tablets on this new phone, which doesn’t yet have a name.

According to BGR, there’s some interesting new hardware on the front of the upcoming Amazon phone. Nestled in the corners of an otherwise nondescript 4.7-inch 720p smartphone display are four IR cameras that are designed to track your face when using the phone. These cameras are responsible for relaying the position of your face to the software, which will change certain aspects of the UI to match. We don’t really know what this means yet, or why this is better than using accelerometers and gryoscopes like almost everyone else, but it’s clearly a big focus for the phone. It could be that Amazon is going to use these four cameras in concert with the front facing-camera to make a more perfect form of face unlock, or maybe make it so text scrolls as you glance up or down. We won’t really know until Amazon tells us, but it’s fun to speculate about.

The phone will run Google’s Android OS underneath, but like everything else Amazon has done with Android it won’t look or even feel like Android. Amazon’s unique user interface will replace the Google UI, and Amazon’s App Store and content catalogs for music and movies will be the stars of the show. The Google Play Store will likely be available to side-load at some point if you’re the ultra-geeky sort and look forward to that sort of thing, but otherwise this phone will be all Amazon all the time.

When Amazon decides to unveil this phone, which could be anywhere from two weeks to six months from now, there’s more than a few questions they will need to answer. Amazon has all the pieces necessary to make something great, but assembling them and explaining why this experience is better will be the actual challenge for them.